rather than spending 100 years to seek a solution that will benefit only a few, we should spend that 100 years preserving what we go and taking care of each other.

Now that I can agree with, but how do you get the masses to see it that way? How do you get the Religious Extremists to stop having Crusades that could very well be the death of us all? How do you even get the extremists to even care about this planet and this life? Shake them out of their delusional states? Sigh… That hasn’t worked yet. :( Dawkins has already tried that and they won’t even crack his book open, much less get an education.

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Mriana
“Sometimes in order to see the light, you have to risk the dark.” ~ Iris Hineman (Lois Smith) The Minority Report

Well, that will work and keep them away from weapons as well as destroy their virtual training video that they give to impressionable children. You know the one. That would be a good start. Now about that war in the Middle East… How you going to get us out of that?

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Mriana
“Sometimes in order to see the light, you have to risk the dark.” ~ Iris Hineman (Lois Smith) The Minority Report

cut off funding, order them to leave, give an apology, offer reparations, hold our former leaders accountable, send them to the ICC and propose a Bush Storage Tax to keep him and his cronies in jail. put our soldiers through some kind of denazification program to filter out all the warmongering jingoism that has been instilled in them with militaristic and patriotic propaganda.

I would strongly encourage - without the threat or the use of force - to begin a national reconciliation program. They - as well as our troops on the way out - might want to look into offering a truce. The Iraqi government could announce an amnesty offer that offers to forgive resistance attacks - with the exception of those committed by foreigners (US included; I think the Iraqis should reconside the immunity law that Bremer put into effect) against civilians - so long as the violence ceases and they disband, disarm and/or disburse, and if they would like they can join the reconciliation program. If the people of Iraq feel they need external security, then they should be given the option to choose who helps them and on what conditions. While I am at it, I would also suggest that the government under occupation be disbanded and that free and fair elections be offered in its place without any candidates or parties being financed by foreigners.

then I would push for the UN to strip away veto powers & permanent seats, expand the security council and allow the inhabitants of the participant countries to elect their ambassadors, take part in global referendums and be afforded international rights (something along the UN Declaration of Human Rights).

And by the second day I would be assassinated by jackals hired by the oil companies….

You know, Steven hawking telling us we have to leave earth just doesn’t fill me with a sense of urgency or dread. To be fair, Steven Hawking telling me that the building is on fire, the flames are spreading rapidly and if we don’t hurry our proteins and sugars will react through an amadori rearrangement mechanism and then polymerise until we are indistinguishable from pork wouldn’t acually cause me to run from the top floor of a tower block. Run it through a speech synthesiser and you will see why.

Oh but according to Christians we need not worry because Jesus will return long before then and take us first to heaven at a million times the speed of light and then directly to a new earth. In fact no Christian I know of believes the earth will just die out but rather burn up after the Rapture and the coming of the Lord in the Clouds with trumpets blowing.

As for atheist I suspect we will all go to hell anyway according to the Christians so why even bothered to take off in a giant space ship to travel many generations to our new home on the planet Rotten as described in the second to the last Nibs misadventure books where the inhabitants are so advanced they have machines to control the weather and theist are not allowed under the penalty of being shot in a rocket back to earth.

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In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holely Goat I bring the truth

That’s as maybe, but I still think Hawking is really unsuited to the prophet of disaster market due to that horribly calm synthesised voice of his. For anyone who wants to know what I’m talking about, write a really nasty set of predictions that are going to happen to the earth in 2008, include the phrase “and the increased weight of our heads will impale our bodies on our own femurs due to the intense gravity.” if you like, turn it into a pdf and select the read out loud function in adobe. It really won’t panic you at all and you will probably just find yourself laughing.

That’s as maybe, but I still think Hawking is really unsuited to the prophet of disaster market due to that horribly calm synthesised voice of his. For anyone who wants to know what I’m talking about, write a really nasty set of predictions that are going to happen to the earth in 2008, include the phrase “and the increased weight of our heads will impale our bodies on our own femurs due to the intense gravity.” if you like, turn it into a pdf and select the read out loud function in adobe. It really won’t panic you at all and you will probably just find yourself laughing.

The interesting situation about Hawking is that his “predictions” and warnings are no more than fantasies.

For example, he claims to find black holes…sure, how can this be verified from trillions and trillions of miles away? Distance creates illusions by lots. It is amazing hiow a group of lunatics can deceive the people with such fantasies. If a star collapses and pulls another star, this attraction causes a collision, and this is the end of the collapsed star. The fantasy is found with the silly assumption that the stars will be extinguished by the collapsed star as when a 10 years old boy extinguishes the flames of his birthday candles.

Come on people, wake up to reality…
Lets buy the idea that robots are mixed with our intellect to the point that they will preserve our culture somewhere else in the Universe to live as…robots.

Lol, what a crap!.

As a skeptic I prefer the biblical description which is more accurate if you read carefully its sentences. The Bible neven mentions a rapture -which is an interpretation of a religious denomination but not a statement found in the bible- , on the contrary, the bible establishes very clearly that the earth has been created for humans, this is to say that humans will inhabited earth forever.

There are inclusive biblical verses saying that if we live between the stars we will be brought back to earth, and that if we live high where the eagles fly we will be brought down.

The bible -as other religions have also predicted for the future- talks about the end of an era in our planet. For this purpose the whole work and life in the surface of the planet will be burn with fire. No leftovers of our culture will survive.

What about humans? If you read Shaul and Kephas (Paul and Peter) you will understand that they talk about a “transformation of bodies”. Apparently our bodies will be transformed into new ones which will have different characteristics as not to decay in corruption as our bodies do today.

How these new bodies will prevail over the heat of the flames? Actually nobody can understand it by scientific means, but the bible states that in this proccess the oceans won’t exist anymore. This is a complete description of a chaotic change in the surface of the earth.

Later, in this “new beginning” after the flames and the going out of the oceans, the presence of the god of the bible will descend from heaven, apparently the bible is talking about a cosmical event which will cause the burned earth to be compressed in that way that a “city of diamonds” will be formed.

Life will start again as it started in the book of genesis which explains that rivers of waters will “come out from underground”. If you read the book of Genesis, a similar event is explained: people still confused about those primeval rivers of Genesis with the current rivers near the Euphrates, but the first rivers mentioned in the bible are flowing from underground and not caused by rain.

In the end of the bible also new rivers will come from underground which is something that has been observed when meteorites have been heated and compressed water has come out from them.

This is interesting because these guys who wrote the bible have observed somehow several physical events that they have mixed later with their religious beliefs. Actually they do not explain science but they do narrate physical events with very good accuracy.

Lets buy the idea that the bible is correct. So, the end of an era comes and the earth suffers a transformation to the point that the light of the Sun is not needed anymore -this is according to the bible-. Having a new earth which starts again to cool off and water start to come out from underground, life is possible to come back again. There are no guaratees about it but lets buy what the bible says for a minute.

New forms of life like humans will appear again, sorry but it appears that no other species will come back, so…no pets allowed.

This new form of life will be incorruptible, so it will last longer than our standard 80 years of age.

What the bible do not mention is about the possibilities of pro-creation with this new form of life. Apparently the new humans will be a certain number which won’t face death anymore but also they won’t pro-create more humans.

I like this “fantasy” better than the fantasies mentioned above by others because I don’t have to do anything but to wait. The current attempts to create robots which will carry our intellect to other planets or to exist in outer space are crap to the square because they will inherited our negative aspects as well.

By traveling to another planets these robots will kill one to another anyway and the end of our cultures will reach us here or at the end of the limits of the universe plus four more blocks further. What a waste of energy

Lets be realistic, we never lived through millions of years before, the species have passed through eras which lasted no more than few thousands of years each time. You can easily verify with this fact by observing how there is not a single natural process of evolutionary steps but exttinction and degeneration of the current species in the world.

We are like areas of land which are saturated already by being used several times for production of food. Everything has a limit in our physical world and we might be reaching our limits already.

The words of Hawking are the words of a child who loves to live in a universe full of fantasies, just look at his recent books full of caricatures…and lies.

I laugh of the ones who believe that following those dreams are thinking that they are smarter or more “scientific” than others.

Sorry to say this but in my opinion such ideas are deluded imaginations…no more than that.

Lets work to change ourselves and to find the way to adapt better to our changing planet, and if one day we are able to travel to far distances in outer space lets do it by preserving our bodies and not as mechanical things with no possibilities of pro-creation.

Between the scientific fantasies exposed in this topic and the religious fantasies, I strongly think that the fantasies of the bible are 100% more plausible.

For example, he claims to find black holes…sure, how can this be verified from trillions and trillions of miles away? Distance creates illusions by lots. It is amazing hiow a group of lunatics can deceive the people with such fantasies. If a star collapses and pulls another star, this attraction causes a collision, and this is the end of the collapsed star. The fantasy is found with the silly assumption that the stars will be extinguished by the collapsed star as when a 10 years old boy extinguishes the flames of his birthday candles.

This bears no actual relation to what a black hole is or how it is discovered. A black hole is what remains after the supernova of a massive star, when the gravity of the core becomes so great that not even light can escape it. (Fewer are created by the merger of two massive stars). Black holes are discovered through indirect means: in particular, through gauging the velocity of circling stars or gases. I’m sure you remember Newton’s laws of motion, and that in particular you can calculate the mass of a star by the rotational velocity and orbit of the material surrounding it. Astrophysicists do that calculation and discover there is a hugely massive object in the center of a system, but one that emits no light. That is very good evidence for a black hole.

Indeed, IIRC, sometimes when they do that calculation they discover that the mass of the central object is so great that it has to be a black hole.

However all of this has nothing to do with Hawking’s predictions in this thread; it is simply irrelevant. And Hawking is hardly the only person discussing black holes. Yes, he is associated with a black hole’s “Hawking radiation”, but that’s a side-light.

conquer - 24 September 2007 01:03 AM

I like this [biblical] “fantasy” better than the fantasies mentioned above by others because I don’t have to do anything but to wait.

It’s one thing to “like” a fantasy, for example as a work of fiction, and quite another to think that it is actually supported by evidence. Believing something because you like it is called “wishful thinking”.

conquer - 24 September 2007 01:03 AM

Between the scientific fantasies exposed in this topic and the religious fantasies, I strongly think that the fantasies of the bible are 100% more plausible.

... if by “plausible” you mean “without a shred of evidence whatever”, at least as regards the future ... but that’s an odd sort of plausibility.

Just wondering, do you take the Mahabharata as seriously? What about other works of religious fantasy? And if not, why not?

Do you take Star Trek seriously as a prediction of the future? Why not?

For example, he claims to find black holes…sure, how can this be verified from trillions and trillions of miles away? Distance creates illusions by lots. It is amazing hiow a group of lunatics can deceive the people with such fantasies. If a star collapses and pulls another star, this attraction causes a collision, and this is the end of the collapsed star. The fantasy is found with the silly assumption that the stars will be extinguished by the collapsed star as when a 10 years old boy extinguishes the flames of his birthday candles.

This bears no actual relation to what a black hole is or how it is discovered. A black hole is what remains after the supernova of a massive star, when the gravity of the core becomes so great that not even light can escape it. (Fewer are created by the merger of two massive stars). Black holes are discovered through indirect means: in particular, through gauging the velocity of circling stars or gases. I’m sure you remember Newton’s laws of motion, and that in particular you can calculate the mass of a star by the rotational velocity and orbit of the material surrounding it. Astrophysicists do that calculation and discover there is a hugely massive object in the center of a system, but one that emits no light. That is very good evidence for a black hole.

Look, lets buy for a minute that such a body exists.

You have a not shinning body which will -according to you- it won’t let light to escape from it.

But, is there any current phenomena supporting such peculiar event? Of course no. You even assume that this black hole can be formed by the merger of two massive stars…but you have no evidence that such event can be possible in reality.

If this forum becomes a public debate and proof is asked, you have nothing but thoughts.

I can tell you the next which can explain a possibility of a star not being visible by us: the star collapses, several clouds of gases sorround the dead star, this clouds of gases can impede any light to get out like the greenhouse effect does with heat in our planet, ans the gases are dark enough to absorb any light hitting them.

But, to think that light can be pulled back by gravity, sorry but such kind of ideas are insane.

According to Relativity, light is not even affected by gravity, Relativity explained that the assumed space-time was distorted and that light passing by in its “straight traveling” will appear to be bending by the distorted space-time.

So, look, what Relativity is telling you is that light is not directly affected by gravity but that light appears to be bending because its new environment has been distorted.

Read now what the whole books about black holes which are based in Relativity say: that light is pulled by gravity. See? this contrariety shows how false are the arguments about black holes.

Indeed, IIRC, sometimes when they do that calculation they discover that the mass of the central object is so great that it has to be a black hole.

However all of this has nothing to do with Hawking’s predictions in this thread; it is simply irrelevant. And Hawking is hardly the only person discussing black holes. Yes, he is associated with a black hole’s “Hawking radiation”, but that’s a side-light.

You said “calculation” which is different to a real observable event. What it is clear about black holes is that this idea started as gigantic stars 590 times as large as the Sun with great mass 590 times as the Sun as well. This is how the author of this idea portrayed the possibility that such gravity will pull light.

But, this idea was based in observations? No.

Such idea was based in mere calculations.

Please, wake up to reality, such idea about black holes pulling light are no more than ideas based in calculations, not so because such event was possible in reality.

Read what you said above: ” the mass of the central object is so great that it has to be a black hole.”

It has to be? come on, one has to be stupid to believe in such crap in the first place.

Hawking is practically a clown when he claims that black holes “evaporate”. Read his writings, who knows what the heck he is trying to say with such “evaporate” but this is a new invented meaning for this word because in scientific tterms evaporation was referred to several phenomena but not to radiation going away.

conquer - 24 September 2007 01:03 AM

I like this [biblical] “fantasy” better than the fantasies mentioned above by others because I don’t have to do anything but to wait.

It’s one thing to “like” a fantasy, for example as a work of fiction, and quite another to think that it is actually supported by evidence. Believing something because you like it is called “wishful thinking”.

From my part I do not wish such ends of eras, I prefer to work hard to maintain the current status of life on Earth.

conquer - 24 September 2007 01:03 AM

Between the scientific fantasies exposed in this topic and the religious fantasies, I strongly think that the fantasies of the bible are 100% more plausible.

... if by “plausible” you mean “without a shred of evidence whatever”, at least as regards the future ... but that’s an odd sort of plausibility.

Just wondering, do you take the Mahabharata as seriously? What about other works of religious fantasy? And if not, why not?

Do you take Star Trek seriously as a prediction of the future? Why not?

Well, as space traveling makes you sick without exceptions, you must have to live consuming drugs in all your traveling to other planets. This will carry consequences because you will survive the traveling but at the costs of harm to your body with drugs which have side effects.

To travel as robots in order to keep “humanity” alive in other planets is also irrelevant by the lack of pro-creation.

So, Star Trek is today an imagination far from our reach, and new movies and tv shows about space traveling must portray people using drugs to keep their health in good shape while going to other galaxies. This will be a more realistic preparation in case that future generations might become capable one day to travel outside our planet to far away planets.

Today, Star Trek shows are portraying space traveling as traveling inside a vehicle from New York to California, this is to say, without the effects in health which are currently observable in the astronauts by standing several months in space.

By the way, check the comic book The Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking loves seeing himself with other travelers in an episode made for Star trek. You’ll love such caricatures found in this book.

Why some religious predictions are more plausible than Star Trek imaginations?

Well, having that the earth is practically a giant meteor and by heating it its compressed water can come out and be preserved as liquid and gases by our atmosphere, we can accept the biblical beginning that the primeval rivers on earth appeared from underground and not by rain. In this, the bible seems to be correct.

The new beginning predicted after the end of the current biblical era is also acceptable when it mentions that new rivers will come out from underground again and new life will start to appear in our planet.

This is a process of recycling, which is also observable in our planet.

The inclusion of giving the credit of those changes to a god as the one who causes them…well, that is a matter which belong to another discussion.

The scenario given in the bible is plausible, it can happen or it can be possible. We don’t know how life was formed from the elements of the universe, but we observe that life exists and in the future life might survive somehow by a process of transformation instead of trying to run away in space ships.